What comes from pouring coffee for a stranger

 It is Lent, when we contemplate God’s great goodness to us and our own unworthiness. The Republicans contemplate the unworthiness of the Democrats, and we contemplate theirs. I have plenty of my own unworthiness to consider but when my wife puts her arms around me I think I must not be all bad. The other day she looked at me and said, “Your hair is trying to do something it really shouldn’t try to do” and that’s about as harsh as she gets.

I had a penitential meal at a motel last week, a complimentary breakfast of synthetic scrambled egg and pseudo-sausage with factory pastries wrapped individually in plastic next to the plastic forks and knives. Breakfast in prison is surely an improvement, especially on death row. I glopped some on a paper plate and imagined a little café where the food is meaningful and a waitress would ask where I’m from, but oh well. As my mother would say, if a lousy breakfast is the most you have to complain about, consider yourself fortunate. And I do.

Calm down, people, it’s going to be okay

To a Minnesotan, “polarization” simply means winter and it happens every year around Thanksgiving: you praise the Almighty for His bounty and in the morning the temperature drops thirty-five degrees and the water heater quits and the fuel oil bill arrives and your winter coat, thanks to the bounty, is two sizes too small. The current usage of “polarization” is way off the mark: we are one people and we are skeptical of raging idealism and wary of aggressive authority — in other words, conservative — and we come to the aid of the helpless and accept a high degree of personal liberty — in other words, liberal. Something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine unites us, tanks attacking apartment buildings: the reality of pure evil clarifies our own situation. Our problem isn’t polarization, it’s Twittification, which is undue attention paid to twits and the inherent decency of the vast majority who patiently listen to shouters and bemoaners and handwringers and weigh what they say even if it’s unintelligible.

Calm down, people. So Ginni Thomas urged the White House to dispose of the 2020 election. Her perfect right. She did not, however, personally go to the Capitol on January 6 and bust down doors and go in and attempt to hang Mike Pence. Give the woman credit. Give No. 45 credit. He could’ve marched on the Capitol, leading a convoy of tanks, and seized the electoral ballot boxes and declared himself president for life, and if this had come up before the Supreme Court, would Justice Thomas have recused himself and would the Court have struck down the lifetime appointment and if they did, how many tanks do they command to enforce the decision? No, it was only a show. No, 45 sat in the White House and watched it on TV and two weeks later he went back to Mar-a-Lago.

One day last week: the best and worst clearly visible

A dear friend came visiting last week with her three-year-old daughter and it was fascinating to see motherhood up close, having never been one myself. It is a conjoined relationship, a grown-up woman taking leave of the adult world to eat, sleep, talk, walk, with a tiny hand clasping her leg. I was an absentee father, ambitious to pursue my own purposes and as a result, when my daughter calls, her first question is, “Where is my mom?” She loves me but she doesn’t count on me. I watch my friend mothering her three-year-old and I admire this, as I would admire someone levitate in midair.

My friend had no time to watch Judge Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearings, but I watched, and the question that never got asked was, “How did you ever pursue this remarkable legal career while raising two daughters?” She sat with great poise and calmly listened to Republican senators who wanted to toss the terms “child pornography” and “sex offender” as many times as humanly possible — senators who are lawyers themselves and know perfectly well the sleazeball game they were playing.

I am alone: please let me tell you about it

I am alone in New York this week, and I have double vision so when I walk down the street, I pass identical twins who often are leading identical dogs and my loneliness feels rather dramatic. Double vision cost me my driver’s license and as a pedestrian I’m moved by the world around me, by the kids playing in the park, squealing and chattering, inheriting this grim world of bad actors and rampant horror. I had a good long life and I’m not sure they’ll have the same opportunities showered on me. This makes me terribly sad.

I once was a hardheaded realist, and now I’m a puddle of tapioca pudding. Partly this is due to being alone for a week. Every happily married man should experience loneliness on a regular basis so he can gauge his own happiness. Loneliness has advantages: you can leave your cereal bowl in the sink for days and nobody says, “Why can’t you put this into the dishwasher?” but on the other hand nobody comes and sits on your lap and says, “I love you. You are precious to me.” Women don’t walk up to you on the street and say that.

The secret of survival is comedy, no kidding

Someone named “Someone” has forwarded me a link to an ad, “How To Lift Sagging Jowls” and of course I’m grateful for their interest in my face, which is a grim face thanks to my evangelical upbringing and which led me to have a long happy career in radio rather than as a Sears Roebuck catalog model, but none of this matters whatsoever in the world we live in, with a mad religious zealot armed with nuclear weapons as glaciers melting and the Amazon forests vanishing and my generation bearing heavy responsibility and here we sit staring helplessly at the news of Ukraine and we have no reassurance to offer our grandchildren, which is an old man’s job, to comfort distressed children, and having none, I believe in comedy even more.

My daughter calls and says, “Make me laugh,” and I do. It’s the best I have to offer. Politics has no leverage at all. Two parties, divided fifty-fifty, one is naïve and inward-looking and the other is demented and owned by a man who’s in politics only so he can monetize it, so the best thing we can do is tell jokes.

So I hang out with funny people, such as my wife. After all these years of marriage, we are still quite fond of each other, especially since neither of us has a contagious disease, which permits occasional physical contact. Humor is a fine reason to marry: sex can be found in books, housekeepers can be hired or you can live in motels, but the ability to make the loved one laugh is what, back when there was Latin, we called a “sine qua non.” Many men are hitched to women with the comic sensibility of a post office clerk in December. Mine is a master of feigned disgust, the raised eyebrow, the double take (“What did you say?”), and her timing — timing is at the heart of comedy — is exquisite. When I hear her say, “Have you put in your eyedrops today?” her timing makes me laugh so hard I weep and so the dry eye syndrome affects me not. If any of my previous wives had said it, it would’ve scorched, but she does it as comedy. And what makes it comedy? The audience. Me. I am now old enough to distinguish comedy from aggression and it’s all comedy.

Sitting scared in church, thinking about evil

In church Sunday we stood and sang, asking God to bring to this world of strife His sovereign word of peace that war may haunt the world no more and desolation cease, and what in God’s name we meant by this, I can’t tell you, it’s like waving your hand at the incoming lightning and saying, “Rain, rain, go away,” a children’s rhyme, but in church we acknowledge we are children, we’re not Unitarians, just ordinary Episcopalians. America has been so fascinated with our own circus, we didn’t fully appreciate true evil and now here’s Putin taking his place with Lenin and Stalin, this small grim man who shells hospitals and apartment buildings, driving three million refugees out of Ukraine. The only decent thing about him is that he doesn’t appear in public with his daughters or his girlfriend, he spares them the shame.

Our former president must regret the photograph in which he and Putin lean toward each other, holding hands, and affection shines in the Russian’s eyes, a moment of bonding. Trump is uncomfortable around dogs and children, odd for a politician, and I can’t recall him with his arm around his youngest boy or his grandkids, or petting a dog or holding a cat; he once claimed to enjoy grabbing women but you never see him with his arm around his wife, but he shows real warmth toward Vlad and it’s not to his political benefit, holding hands with a man capable of bombing a maternity hospital.

Which side are you on, if I may ask

The war is far away and then it is up close. I write a parody of Frost’s “Stopping By Woods” in which the man stops to pee and out of nowhere I remember the photograph in the Times of a Ukrainian family trying to escape the Russian advance, hurrying through a small town to catch a train to somewhere, a young boy, girl, mother, a family friend, carrying packs and a dog in a carrier, towing a suitcase, and here they lie freshly dead, murdered by Russian mortars shelling civilians, no military engagement nearby, and the image stays with you, the friend face-up, the boy and girl lying on their sides, and who will tell the father who is probably fighting somewhere, who will bury them, who will commemorate these senseless horrible deaths?

The Minneapolis paper ran a story about the Times’s decision to run the picture but didn’t run the picture, which isn’t gruesome or bloody, but simply terribly real. Four people suddenly killed for no reason except to cause suffering. The Russians have shelled power plants, hospitals, refugees, and war crimes are fundamental to Putin’s policy, and the photograph was the Times’s way to show that. The picture is clear in my mind days later.

Reality is a good antidote, America. Take a long hard look.

 “God created war so that Americans would learn geography,” said Mr. Twain, so now you sit in a New York apartment and try to reassemble your memory of Europe, where Germany and Poland are, and text with friends in Prague whose frightened little girls ask, “What is happening?” We don’t know. In one week, we’ve been transported back to 1940, and our Europe of chic vacations and intellectual ferment is now the cauldron of wars that our grandparents fled. My grandpa fled Glasgow, having five children and no wish to see the Great War up close, and my friend Bud Trillin’s people fled Ukraine for the reason Jews have been migrating for centuries. Chic had nothing to do with it, they were quite pleased to become Missourians.

Reality is a shock but it does make things more real. American military strategy goes out the window: how do you strategize against a schizoid dictator with an enormous nuclear arsenal and a compliant elite? Rationalism is only an observation. The stone-faced Putin has invaded an independent nation, firing rockets at a nuclear reactor, women and children in Kyiv weeping as they board a train for Poland, looking at husbands and fathers they may never see again, thanks to the small man at the end of the forty-foot table who says he is conducting an anti-Nazi mission, a naked lie as naked as the belief that COVID is a hoax or Trump won the election.
The hero of the moment is Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish comic who is now the guerilla president of Ukraine, and as long as he keeps dancing and making video speeches to his people, Ukraine survives, and when a Russian kill squad finds him, Ukraine becomes a Soviet republic again.

I come from the heartland, I live in New York

Now that we know the State of the Union is good and we’re into Lent, one should examine the State of the Soul, I suppose, but all I can think of are the dumb things I’ve done in my life, for which I hold an all-time record, hands down, shoes laced together. That is why I never looked for a shrink: they don’t deal with cluelessness; it is beyond them. I come from a family of capable people but I’ve ingested the wrong animal fats or maybe my pillow is too hard. I don’t know. Literally, I don’t.

I remember soul-searching when I was a boy, sitting under ferocious preaching in our evangelical church (we called it a Meeting to distinguish ourselves from the Papists), and the sermons were about imminent death and I imagined dying in a car crash, bomb explosion, sinking ship, and being ushered into Eternity and I wanted to accept Jesus as my Savior, but I felt it should be a tumultuous emotional moment with weeping in a prostrate heap, and not simply checking the “Yes” box, and I didn’t know how to make myself sincerely tumultuous so I doubted my own salvation. Now I’m old and never think about death and feel gratitude for God’s grace though I don’t claim to understand it. My weeping is due to nostalgia at old hymns such as “Standing On The Promises,” which we Episcopalians don’t sing but we sing songs that remind me of it.

What you won’t read in the paper, except now

I was born in 1942, a year that hasn’t been recent for a long time and now I’m strolling toward 80, an age when I can stop feeling bad that I never finished reading Moby-Dick. I got to page 20 and Melville hadn’t even gotten them on the boat yet. At 80 I put the idea of self-improvement behind me once and for all. I have considered cosmetic surgery, a muscle implant around my mouth so that I can grin, but once you start corrective surgery, you may go on to have a chest lift or butt reduction and your belly button winds up in your armpit and your butt comes out lopsided so you’ll need to wear orthopedic pants. So I accept myself as is.

As for IQ, it’s in trouble. I was a columnist for the Washington Post back in the fall of 2016 when I realized that H.L. Mencken had done it so much better when he wrote, “A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in. The men the American people admire most are the most daring liars; the men they detest most are those who try to tell them the truth. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will get their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” That day arrived, so I got out of journalism and resumed having fun.